I was offered an AMAZING opportunity yesterday! My school is doing a new ad campaign (we are an independent school) and I was asked to be the faculty representative in the campaign – but, that is not the exciting part! As part of the photo shoot, I get to design my dream classroom/workspace!
I am a HUGE believer in the power of collaboration and teaching students using 21st century learning skills. I believe that a teacher should act more as a coach, than a “Sage on the Stage”. I want students to be completely engaged and immersed in the learning process, using whatever tools fit their learning style. I LOVE technology and encourage my students to use technology every chance they have! To be given the opportunity to take all that I believe and turn it into my dream classroom is amazing!
When I was approached, I knew exactly what I would do. Just the day before I had been reading this blog post on using ipads and project
based learning on a science lesson. I am going to take this lesson and incorporate it into a design based classroom. I am going to use the ideas from the D School at Stanford to create an amazing collaboration space where students can research, design, build, make mistakes, fail, and start over again!
So, as soon as I found out I had this awesome opportunity I set about to design my room. My classroom will be walls that are all whiteboards. We are going to use shower board to make the white boards. We found the plans here. The room will have fabric cubes for the students to sit on and we will have some tables for students to spread out materials. We are also going to add in bins with all types of supplies for students to work with – expo markers, post-it notes (LOTS AND LOTS OF POST_ITS) yarn, foam, colored pencils, pipe cleaners, paper, etc. Here is a sketch of my room design.
As I work out the details of the lesson and the room comes together I will post more details. Also, I will post what happened when I asked students to help with the photo shoot, but emphasized to them we would be doing and actual lesson and they would have to do more work!
The ability to design the workspace of your choice is an amazing opportunity. What would you do if given the opportunity to design your dream classroom?
A Teacher and Technology 